Blog posts tagged with 'frank bures'

In his new book The Geography of Madness travel writer Frank Bures explores “how our ideas can kill us, how our beliefs can save us and how these things quietly determine the course of our lives.” His quest to understand culture-bound syndromes led him to Nigeria, Borneo, Singapore, China and beyond. In these places Bures pursues “fox ghosts and lizards that crawl under your skin, poison pork and poisoned minds.” He becomes fascinated with the world’s strangest syndromes, exploring how one culture could believe something that would appear entirely out of the realm of possibility to another.

Kindly contributed by travel writer Frank Bures, whose new book The Geography of Madness explores the phenomenon of culture-bound syndromes across the globe, from a community of men in Nigeria to believe their penises have been stolen to China, Singapore, Borneo and beyond. His quest: to understand "how our ideas can kill us, how our beliefs can save us and how these things quietly determine the course of our lives."

During high school, travel writer Frank Bures spent a year in Italy as an exchange student. When he returned, he writes in his new book The Geography of Madness, he was not the same person. But rather than accepting the simple adage that travel can be life-changing, Bures wants to know what happened. “How was that possible?” he asks. “How could moving from one place, from one language, from one culture to another…change who you are?”
While the experience of culture shock and its aftermath is a familiar one, most travelers will not have encountered what Bures describes in subsequent travels that took him to Nigeria, Borneo, Singapore, China and elsewhere.